Document Review Meetings

mtlynch on Hacker News on 2025-08-04:

> Amazon meetings start with the presenter passing out copies... of a prose document... The meeting starts with everyone sitting in silence, reading the document, and adding notes and questions in the margins with red pen.

I've never worked at Amazon, but I've heard this a lot, and it always strikes me as an odd practice. Odder still is that it apparently works and everyone I hear talk about it seems to love it.

You're squandering precious meeting time by having everyone sit and read a document together. They could easily do the same thing ahead of the meeting, and you'd have much shorter meetings.

And doing it synchronously means everyone either sits idle until the slowest reader is ready or not everyone gets to finish in time. And "slowest reader" isn't even just about reading speed. Presumably, some people can understand the document more quickly because they have more context.

There are replies speaking to the consequences of investing in the read-ahead culture, so click through if you're interested — I'll just say in my 9 years of Amazon experience, all the senior leaders have back-to-back meetings most days, sometimes double or triple booked, so reading-ahead time doesn't generally exist for them.

There's a nuanced wrinkle tucked into the document reading culture that doesn't get talked about much, which is the size of these documents. By requiring the reading of the design document in a meeting, this limits the amount of time left in the meeting for discussion and alignment. Your primary purpose in the meeting is to persuade the audience of some course of action, work through any details, and receive approval from that audience of stakeholders. The culture frowned on meetings longer than 1 hour — this naturally limits the length of documents, forcing concision and necessary pre-work. This is partly why Amazon would talk about one-pagers and 6-pagers, the size of documents that can fit in 30 minute or 1 hour meeting slots while still allowing for feedback and discussion.

The constellation of practices discussed above work together to produce digestible details while allowing for discussion and agreement, making meetings more purposeful and therefore more valuable. Switching the culture to reading ahead would not intrinsically incentivize well-sized documents (if a design or document was too large, you'd naturally find yourself popping up a level to get agreement on a strategy document, before going down a level for a more detailed design document), actionable within a reasonably sized meeting.